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LLNL, Ampera partner to develop thorium-based TRISO fuel
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has formed a strategic partnership with Ampera to develop the company’s nuclear fuel concept through a project named THUNDER, for Thorium Unimodal Droplet Ejection for Reactors.
The focus of THUNDER is fabricating TRISO made with kernels of thorium rather than the usual uranium. LLNL and Ampera will evaluate and optimize liquid metal–jetting technology to produce highly uniform, spherical kernels of thorium-232 for later processing into TRISO fuel.
Shao-Rong Wu, Klaus Rehme
Nuclear Technology | Volume 89 | Number 1 | January 1990 | Pages 103-115
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT90-A34362
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Measurements of the mean velocity, wall shear stresses, and turbulent Reynolds stresses were performed in wall subchannels of two rod bundles. The rod bundle of four parallel rods was arranged symmetrically in a rectangular channel. The pitch-to-diameter ratio was 1.148, and the wall-to-diameter ratios were 1.045 and 1.074, respectively. The Reynolds numbers in these investigations were 6.11 × 104 and 7.07 × 104, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate once more that the structure of turbulence in rod bundles differs greatly from the structure in circular tubes. Especially in the narrow gaps between the rods and channel walls, there are increased levels of turbulence intensities in both the axial and azimuthal directions and, hence, of the kinetic energy of turbulence, caused by a strong turbulent momentum transport through the gaps. In comparison with the previous investigations in these geometries, however, arranged asymmetrically in the rectangular channels, the momentum transport between the subchannels across the gap between the rods is negligible. The comparison between the experimental wall shear stress distributions and those computed by the VELASCO code shows strong deviations, especially in the gap regions between the rods and channel walls. More sophisticated analytical tools than presently available are required to predict turbulent flow through rod bundles with sufficient accuracy.